


we are not traitors but the lights go out

by TolkienGirl



Category: The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: Angst, F/M, Maiming, Marriage, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-05
Updated: 2018-12-05
Packaged: 2019-09-07 17:05:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16857925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: Attolia feels as if she alone kills in cold blood.





	we are not traitors but the lights go out

_“Galen,” he whispered, “do you think that if people are crippled in this life, they are crippled in the afterlife as well?”_

_The physician lowered the cup. “You would know that better than I,” he said._

_“No,” said Eugenides. “I don’t know.”_

 

When the olive leaves are gold by some lights and green by others, when the orange trees stoop, laden with fragrant fruit, Attolia thinks how little suited she is to summer.

Sounis has killed and has not regretted it. Eddis has ordered men to battles that never let them return. The thief, almost certainly, has stabbed his way out of danger.

Yet Attolia feels as if she alone kills in cold blood.

 

If she had killed him, then—if she had given him a swift death, would she have mourned him?

She hates herself for the question, and hates herself still more for not knowing the answer.

 

Whenever he says  _I love you_ , he says it like a prayer, breathed soft against her skin, a shuddering breath or a flame in the wind of mountains.

She rarely feels that she deserves to say it back.

(Sometimes, you see, he forgets. Forgets that he does not have a hand, and reaches. Some things are second nature; some things are not natural at all.)

(Whenever she says  _I’m sorry_ , she says it like a prayer.)

 

Beauty is a cage, power a key.

A key is nothing, without a lock.

Power must open what the gods have left closed.

Attolia whispers that, sometimes, in the dark.

 

The sun falls on Attolia less warmly than it does on Eddis—queen as well as country. In Attolia, the air may be thick with heat in midsummer, but it leaks out cool and damp, drawn by the sea. The king shivers. He has not, after all, been king for very long.

The gods love Eddis better than they do Attolia.

(Queen as well as country.)

 

Moira visits her in a dream.

Attolia regards her, waits for her, and does not ask.

“You have been wise, of late,” Moira says at last. Her hands are clasped against her waist. Red stones gleam in gold rings. “It may not be enough.”

 

Eugenides, so the legends go, must die by falling.

“Stay away from the rooftops,” she murmurs at midnight. “Maybe it’s time. Maybe you can just—”  _Come through my door_ ,  _share my chamber_. These are all suggestions that she ought to be too wise to make, even with the kingdom squarely in their grasp.

“Nightmares again?” Eugenides strokes her hair.

She—Irene—says nothing.

He speaks, low and steady. “I will die someday,” he says. “If before you, you will be strong enough to bear it. If after…well, it will be because I was not.” He pauses, then adds, “Strong enough.”

“You are.” She barely makes a sound.

“Perhaps you saved me.” His handless wrist rests lightly on the coverlet. In the darkness, still, they can feel its absence. “Perhaps you saved me from the fate of thieves.”

She does not know if she imagines something wistful in his voice.

 

She would have mourned him, she decides. In her way, in her cold way, which is unlike anyone else’s. She would have raged against the loss she wrought herself.

A swift death, and his body whole.

 

Attolia has been wise, of late.


End file.
